Numéro special sur « L'histoire du tourisme au Canada » / Special Issue on "The History of Tourism in Canada." ed. by J.I. Little and Ben Bradley (review)

This special issue of Histoire sociale / Social Historybrings together ten articles on the history of tourism in Canada. It emerged from a 2014 workshop supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connections grant, Simon Fraser University, and the Network in Canadian History and Environment. Guest editors Ben Bradley and J.I. Little note that the issue delivers the first collection of articles devoted specifically to the tourism history of Canada. The articles are excellent. However, the rationale and core research questions of this new subfield of Canadian history remain unclear–perhaps reasonably so.

The editors' introduction identifies the intersecting themes of landscape, nature, and memory as the focus of the special issue. A more fundamental thread that runs throughout many, if not all, of the articles might be tourism's relationship to capitalist modernity. Articles by Ian McKay, Alan Gordon, and Ben Bradley, for instance, examine commemorative history initiatives that worked to produce commodified, romantic versions of the past designed to appeal to tourists. And Susan Nance shows how horse behaviour at the Calgary Stampede in the 1920s was cultivated behind the scenes to stage bronco-busting performances that met tourist expectations of an authentic old West. The modern world of automobiles, highways, and hydroelectricity created the material conditions for modern tourism, including hydrotourism, the subject of an essay by Daniel Macfarlane, and it also created nostalgia for a pre-modern, romantic past. Capitalist modernity in this way created both the supply and demand for tourism.

Tourists were also attracted by the remoteness of destinations, places imagined to be unmarked by the modern world. In accounts of his 1864 voyage to Labrador published in the Atlantic Monthly, American tanscendentalist minister David Atwood Wasson presented the Labrador shorescape as an untamed wasteland and the Inuit as unevolved. J.I. Little concludes in his contributed essay that Wasson's attitude reflected the growing influence of evolutionary theory in racial thinking, which distanced first-generation transcendentalists from Wasson's racism. Tina Adcock's article looks at "adventurous tourists" who sought travel in the Northwest Territories. From the 1920s to the 1940s, territorial administrators acted to manage this potentially troublesome brand of tourist who desired the physical and psychological strains of travel, in escape from a modern world where risk was managed and activities carefully planned. Administrators complained of the costs involved in rescuing these ill-prepared travellers and worried about their influence upon Indigenous people. Edward MacDonald and Alan MacEachern demonstrate how, in the era of mass tourism, Prince Edward Island's isolation as an island was addressed by tourist promoters. By the post-war period, they sought to make the voyage from the mainland to the island a significant part of the tourist experience. Modern convenience and accessibility thus existed in tension with the desire to feel the experience of visiting an island.

Articles by Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere and Jenny Clayton explore tourism histories interconnected with nationalism and national identity. Late nineteenth-century view books, as Cavaliere argues, presented and made legible the distant environs of Canada to the public via photography, which also contributed to the creation of a distinctly Canadian iconography. And Clayton shows how the emergence of Mount Revelstoke as a tourist attraction was associated with the local efforts of Scandinavian residents who wanted to demonstrate their loyalty to the British Crown during the First World War. At a time when state authorities viewed continental European communities as potentially disloyal, Scandinavians in Revelstoke used skiing and winter sport events to distinguish themselves from continental Europeans who had fallen under suspicion. These cases demonstrate the complex combination of commercial and civic aims embedded in tourist promotion.

This special issue includes important research contributions. But it also suggests significant gaps in the field, and core areas of...